Aperion Care Chicago Heights

This facility's grades were horrible across the board. In particular, we wanted to point out its inspection grade where we gave it an F. This isn't a good sign for its inspection reports. When a facility has this bad of an inspection rating, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. This particular facility had 4 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they caused a risk to resident health or safety. Lastly, this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an F. Nursing ratings are mostly based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provided a meager 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is an alarmingly low total. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these metrics to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Another unfortunate development was the F this nursing home received in the category of long-term care. Facilities that don't fare well in long-term care typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 39.73799 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is quite a bit lower than what we expected. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best feature in this category.

The next area we graded is short-term care. We gave it an F in this area, which is a very poor score. In our short-term care grade, we seek to create a fair measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at the facility's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Based on its abysmal grade in this area, we were not stunned to find that this nursing home provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.